Drupal & Dropbox: An Improved Workflow

Friday, October 08, 2010

I develop my sites on two different machines; constantly SVN committing and SVN upping just to keep files in sync between the two. And worse, I'm forever doing mysqldumps to keep my local databases up to date.

And then it dawned on me...

I moved my entire MAMP webroot ~/Sites into my Dropbox folder. Then I created a symlink: ln -s ~/Dropbox/Sites ~/Sites. I created this same symlink on my second development machine. All of a sudden, I was able to make code changes on either machine and not have to worry about what I was dong on what machine and when. Dropbox did all that thinking and syncing for me.

That works great for code changes, but what about the database you ask? All I did here was move my /Applications/MAMP/database folder to ~/Dropbox/database and created a similar symlink.